Families of British Home Children / British Child Migrants

Member Lori Oschefski has created a petition to request the Canadian government help fund BHC descendants in their requests for records from Barnardo's and other agencies.

Click to SIGN THE PETITION

Why This Is Important

Approximately 125,000 children were forced to immigrate into Canada from Great Britain, between 1860 and 1939, many of them torn away from their parents and brothers and sisters. They are collectively known as The British Home Children. This seems like so long ago now, but many of their descendants are still to this day struggling to piece together their past family history. This isn’t simply idle curiosity, it is closure for many and a desperate attempt to gain a sense of belonging that most of us are fortunate enough to take for granted. Imagine how it must feel to have no idea of your past family history and where your roots truly belong and worst of all that you have or may have family members who don’t even know you exist.

Many of the Home Children were brought up to believe they were outcasts and less worthy than others in society. Some were treated as slave labour and suffered terrible abuse in the building and settling of early Canada.

It’s too late for most of them now, but not for their descendants who lobby Barnardo’s and other agencies in England for information about their parents and grandparents. The information is available but is costly and many families cannot afford to pay for their records. The British and Australian Government leaders have publicly and with great humility, apologized to the home children and to their descendants while the Canadian Government, to their deep shame, has not. This petition aims to gain your support to lobby the Government of Canada to, at the very least, offer a grant to the relatives of Home Children to enable them to pay Barnardo's and other agencies in England for their family information.

Please support us and make a real difference to the lives of many. 

Whilst the successful ship-owners, slave-traders, mill and factory proprietors, merchants, and entrepreneurs became ever more wealthy, powerful, and comfortable, those ordinary people of Liverpool who had generated that wealth were trapped in their poverty.

Large, Georgian town-houses that had been built in the Town-centre - before the great ‘Middle-Class exodus’, and the spacious mansions and villas of central Liverpool, all had cellars built into them for the domestic servants and household staff. However, once the merchants and their families had moved out, having sold their former homes to opportunistic landlords, the labouring classes moved in; often more than one family to each room, and paying rent for extremely poor and frequently overcrowded accommodations. After the upper floors had been filled with new tenants, the cellars soon filled up too: these properties became Liverpool's first slums.

The workers, who laboured on the dock and canal-sides, and in the factories and workshops; their families, and those of the mariners setting sail on frequent, long, and uncertain sea-voyages around the world, could not afford to leave the grimy, dark, and unhealthy heart of the Town.

They were trapped, in an increasingly over-crowded urban metropolis, finding themselves eking out their existences in squalor. Indeed, the census of 1789/90 noted that people were living in the cellars of buildings because there was not enough existing housing to meet demand. The same census reported that there were 1,728 occupied cellars, containing 6,788 people, which at that time was approximately 12% of the Town's population.

Between 1869 and 1930, over 100,000 children were sent to Canada from Ireland, Scotland and England. They were known as the “British Home Children” - children orphaned, abandoned, seized from over-crowded workhouses or from parents unable to provide for them, who were sent to the new world “for labour,” and placed with farms and families, from Halifax to Manitoba.

“The Workhouses were being overrun, and criminals were taking over the children,” Karen Mahoney told a capacity crowd at the January 21 meeting of the Innisfil Historical Society. “Some philanthropists thought they ought to do something for the children.”

Among those philanthropists were Amy MacPherson and her sisters, and Dr. Bernardo. They and as many as 50 other organizations funnelled thousands of children taken from almost Dickensian poverty, to Canada - far from family, friends, and everything that was familiar. Children as young as 3 arrived with little more than a pair of shoes, a change of clothing, and a bible.

What they found in Canada was indentured servitude, prejudice and often horrible conditions.

Mahoney was drawn into researching the stories of the British Home Children when she inherited mementoes and letters written by Herbert Blackall - a British Home Child who had found a happy home with her husband’s family, and had kept in touch while serving in World War I. He died at Paschendale, a decorated war hero.

Starkly different was the story of 15 year old George Everett Green, found dead in his room on a farm in Owen Sound in 1895. The subsequent investigation found that his death was due to “starvation, abuse and neglect,” but no charges were ever laid.

British Home Children were supposed to be allowed to attend school and church, and paid for their labour - but often were kept from classes, and given the worst of jobs. Many children kept silent out of fear and shame, or escaped by running away.